CHILDREN'S BEST SELLERS: PAPERBACK BOOKS: Sunday, November 30th 2008

Published: November 30, 2008

Rankings reflect sales, for the week ended Nov. 15, at many thousands of venues where a wide range of general interest books are sold nationwide. These include hundreds of independent book retailers (statistically weighted to represent all such outlets); national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; university, gift, supermarket, discount, department stores and newsstands. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. Perennial sellers are not actively tracked. Expanded rankings are available on the Web: nytimes.com/books. All four children’s lists appear each week on the Book Review’s Web site. Publishers have provided the age designations for their best-selling children’s titles.

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CHILDREN'S BEST SELLERS: PAPERBACK BOOKS

1

2

The BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, by John Boyne. (Random House, $8.99.) A boy’s innocence is eroded in evil times. (Ages 12 and up)

2

42

THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX, by Kate DiCamillo. Illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering. (Candlewick, $7.99.) A mouse, a rat and a girl on a magic trip. (Ages 10 and up)

3

62

THE BOOK THIEF, by Markus Zusak. (Knopf, $11.99.) A girl saves books from Nazi burning and shares them with a Jewish man in hiding. (Ages 14 and up)

4

6

SLAM, by Nick Hornby. (Riverhead, $14.) A skateboarder gets his high school girlfriend pregnant and wonders, What would Tony Hawk do? (Ages 12 and up)